The
Northwest Angle, known simply as
the Angle by locals, and coterminous with
Angle Township, is a part of northern
Lake of the Woods County,
Minnesota that is the only part of the
United States outside of
Alaska that is north of the
49th parallel. That parallel is the northern boundary of the
48 contiguous states extending eastward from the west coast along the northern boundaries of
Washington,
Idaho,
Montana,
North Dakota, and part of Minnesota to the Northwest Angle. Farther east, U.S. territory does not extend that far north.
Map projections sometimes create an
optical illusion that
Maine extends farther north than that; that illusion does not occur in maps in which parallels of
latitude are straight lines. Like Alaska,
Point Roberts,
Washington, and
Elm Point,
Minnesota (also at Lake of the Woods), the Northwest Angle cannot be reached from the rest of the United States without either going through
Canada, flying in via small aircraft, or crossing water—specifically, the
Lake of the Woods. A sizeable portion of the Angle is held in trust by the
Red Lake Indian Reservation (
Ojibwa). As this area is uninhabited, there are no permanent Ojibwa residents.
[1]The total population of the Angle was 152 at the 2000 census.
The northwest corner of the Northwest Angle is at 49°23'4.1?N, 95°09'12.2?W.
The Treaty of Paris (1783), concluded between the United States and Great Britain at the end of the American Revolutionary War, stated that the boundary between U.S. territory and the British possessions to the north would run "…through the Lake of the Woods to the most northwesternmost point thereof, and from thence on a due west course to the river Mississippi…" The parties did not suspect that the source of the Mississippi, Lake Itasca (then unknown to European explorers), was south of that point. A factor in this mistake was the use of the Mitchell Map during the treaty negotiations; that map showed the Mississippi extending far to the north. In the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, the error was corrected by having the boundary run due south from the northwest point of the lake to the 49th parallel and then westward along it. When a survey team led by David Thompson finally located the northwesternmost point of the lake and surveyed this north-south line, it was found to intersect other bays of the lake and therefore cut off a portion of U.S. territory, now known as the Northwest Angle.
